The Great Awakening

I had once been told that the American Revolution began with a Baptist Revival. That is somewhat true, I think it was the pre running of the Methodist. While in our history books we're told that religious persecution was the primary factor in the migration of Europeans to the New World, and how we came to promote religious tolerance on account of it; this is not entirely so. A man named George Whitefield caused quite a stir in New England and eventually as far down as Savanna. Jonathan Edwards was another. The Puritans of new England didn't take well to them and they had the political power, having laws passed to prevent them from spreading their view of the Gospel. But Whitefield was a charismatic preacher. Benjamin Franklin went to hear him preach out of doubt about the size of crowds that the man drew. He would preach to 25,000 people without a microphone. Ben Franklin had to see it for himself. After which Franklin and some other men raised money to have a meeting house built to house the Revivals or any other religious event. Many of the people in the Great Awakening did not want to pay taxes to a church that they disagreed with, and resisted at risk of being jailed and fined. These were seeds of Revolution, another chemical in the mix. "The Age of Enlightenment" rising.

I'm now reading a book on Ethan Allen. If you don't know who Ethan Allen was, he was a major player in the American Revolution. . He was the leader of The Green Mountain Boys, which was not a backwoods militia as you would think. He,rather easily, captured Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain. The British Garison knew nothing of the events at Concord Green due to word being sent around Nova Scotia and down the St. Lawrence.

Here is where I wanted to go into talking about another man in the bloody history of Lake Champlain, Robert Rogers. I had read a great book about his life earlier this summer. But, these two men are a complicated history.

The Appalachianist